by Carol Berg
Nothing was left to take with me. Every shred of clothing, every trinket, every paper and book and picture had been burned. The gold locket with the bits of dried rose petal inside, my wedding ring. The bastards had taken everything—No, don’t think. Just walk. The time for pain and hatred and grief would come after I was away. And so I walked out of the room and out of the palace and out of my life.
Strange to find it mid-afternoon. Time had been suspended for so many months, the passing of days marked only by my changing body. For all those days I had existed in the unyielding, unvarying embrace of death, yet out here in the palace gardens, bitter winter had been replaced by damp spring. Life had continued for the hundred gardeners trimming the hundreds of trees beside the carriage road on which I walked. Crocuses were already drooping, and the showier blooms of daffodils and anemones fluttered brightly in the damp breeze.
Two horsemen raced by, then pulled up short and turned back toward me as I approached the first ring wall. Tomas and Darzid. “Seri, you damned fool, where do you think you’re going?” Tomas, speaking in his best lord-of-the-manor style.
I kept walking. The two wheeled their mounts and placed themselves in front of me again, blocking the entire roadway. “I spoke to you, Seri. It can’t be healthy for you to be out so soon.”
Words broke through my vowed silence, as molten lava bursts the volcano’s rocky cap. “And when have you ever concerned yourself with me or my health?”
My brother was not even a whole year older than me— as near twins as could be, so our nursemaids had always said—-but the warm droplets trickling down my leg reminded me of the ageless gulf between us. My hands ached for a throwing dagger or my bow and a poisoned arrow.
“I won’t see my sister die among the rabble like some whore who whelped in an alley.”
“Then you’ll have to carry me, brother, and risk bloodying your fine breeches. The blood will match that on your hands, and it will never wash away.” I walked into the gardens beyond the first wall, hoping to get past the outer gates before I collapsed. My knees were trembling. Vengeance is the right of blood kin, even against blood kin. Blood for blood. Vengeance was my duty.
“Seri, come back here!”
Tomas ordered Darzid to follow me, while he himself fetched servants and a litter. So the captain trailed behind as I walked through the outer gates into the teeming midafternoon business of Montevial. Everything blurred together: smells of horses and new-baked bread, rushing figures of tradesmen, liveried messengers, and matrons in fluttering cap-ribbons, the clattering of cart wheels, and the shouts of drovers trying to clear a way through the muddy, crowded streets. How could the matter of one dark winter make such commonplace activity so utterly alien?
“Move along, wench. Are you struck dumb?”
Darzid observed from his black horse, unruffled as the constable poked at me with his stick. Once I had considered Darzid my friend, but I had come to believe that he would have watched me burn alongside Karon with this same unemotional curiosity.
I wobbled against a barrow piled with apples before heading down a sloping lane into the mobbed market of the capital city, vaguely aware of apples bouncing all over the street, a startled horse, and a careening hay wagon. Someone in the street behind me cursed and cracked a whip. But I could no longer bring the angry rider’s name into my throbbing head. Concentrating was so difficult…
As I walked past booths hung with lengths of fabric, coils of rope, and tin pots strung together, mats covered with raw, staring fish, wagons of fruits and hay, and pens of squawking chickens, thickening clouds devoured the sun. I shivered in the sudden chill. Halfway down a lane of food vendors, a hunchbacked old man doled out soup to anyone with a copper coin and a mug. I felt hollow. Empty. But when the old man held out his ladle to me, I shook my head. “I’ve no money, goodman. Nothing to offer you. Nothing.” And then the world spun and fell out from under me…
Scents of damp canvas and mildew intruded on my chaotic dreams. A scratchy blanket was tucked under my chin, and the surface under my back was hard and uneven. As I dragged my eyelids open to murky light, my neck was bent awkwardly, and a warm metal cup, quivering slightly and giving off the scent of warmed wine, was pressed to my lips. A few tart drops made their way to my tongue. A few more dribbled down my chin.
“Poor girl,” said a voice from the dimness, a cracked, leathery voice of uncertain timbre.
“Who could she be, dearie? She don’t have the look of a street wench, for all she’s dressed so plain.” This second speaker was surely an aged man.
“Nawp. No street wench. Look at the hands.” Two warm, rough hands chafed my fingers. I was so cold. “It’s a lady’s hands. What’re we to do with her, Jonah?”
“Can’t just leave her, can we? She’s just—” The old man’s words quavered and broke off.
“Just the age would be our Jenny.” So the sighing one was a woman. “Let’s keep her for the night. Don’t look as if she’ll care this is no fine house, nor even that she might not wake up where she went to sleep.”
“Aye, then. We’ll be on our way.”
While I drifted between sleep and waking, the bed on which I lay began to move, rocking and jogging over cobbled streets. The old woman stroked my hair and my hands, and crooned to me gently, while rain plopped softly on the canvas roof.
“How did you discover it, my dear?”
“She was shivering so, and terrible pale. I thought she was fevered. But when she held her tits just so and wept in her sleep for the pain of them, I knew. It’s been less than a day, and she’s lost a river of blood, and I don’t know if it’s been too much or no. If we’d left her in the market, she’d be dead for sure. ”Twas a good deed you did, old man.“
“Ah. This adds a worry though. Fine ladies don’t dress in working garb and take a stroll through the market after they’ve dropped a babe, live or dead. There’s trouble here someways. We’d best get her afoot as soon as can be, and put some leagues in between us.”
A hand gouged my aching abdomen, forcing me to cry out as I stumbled out of sleep.
“There, there, child. We must knead your belly a bit to stop the bleeding. You’ll do better in a day or three.” The hand pressed and squeezed again, then took my own hand and forced me to do it, too. “Feel your womb harden. That’s the way it must be.”
A worried face hovered above me in the dust-flecked light. Unlike that of the turbaned physician, this face was connected to a body—a small and wiry woman with broken teeth. Her gray curls were tied up in a red scarf, and her face was gently weathered.
“Here, my man Jonah’s bringing summat to perk you up.” A flap at the end of the wagon flopped open to let in soggy sunlight and the hunchbacked soup-maker from the market. The old man had wispy white hair and soft brown eyes that seemed to embrace the old woman when he looked at her.
“Thank—”
The old couple shushed me with a spoonful of soup. While they fed me, they gabbled about everything: business in the market, good prospects for the coming season, too much rain for the early crops. “We’re headed south for Dunfarrie. It’s planting time. If you’ve a place we can leave you on the way… friends who’ll care for you?”
I shook my head. All our friends were dead. Like the books and the pictures, the few who had shared Karon’s secret had been destroyed. He had been forced to hear them die, one by one: Martin, Julia, Tanager, Tennice, everyone he cared about. It had almost undone him. His tormentors told him he wasn’t to know my fate, and they would taunt him with a different cruel story every day. But they never knew he could read my thoughts, or speak to me without words, or bury himself in my love so deeply that what they did to his body didn’t matter. Until the end—until the fire.
“I didn’t mean to cause you more grief,” said the old woman in distress. “We’ll take you with us until you can see your way, little girl. Old Jonah and Anne will have you up, if for nothing but to get away from our foolish prattle.”
&nbs
p; “Vengeance is my right,” I said. “My duty…” But not on that night.
The old woman gathered me in her arms and rocked me softly, for at last weakness overwhelmed me, and I wept until there could have been no tears left in the world.
But I would never weep again. I was a Leiran warrior’s daughter, and by the shields of my ancestors, I would not weep.
CHAPTER 4
When I woke, I was startled to find Aeren’s face an arm’s length from my own. He sat on the floor cross-legged, peering at me quizzically, his finger poised to touch my cheeks. I sat up abruptly, and he jerked his hand away.
“Keep your paws to yourself,” I said, straightening my shift and running my fingers through my tangled hair, wishing he would point his eyes in some other direction, wishing I knew some way to banish dreams.
Aeren knitted his brow at my words, as if working at it hard enough would make the syllables fall together in a way that made sense.
Was it was worth the trouble to keep talking to the man? Could the sheer number of my words somehow alleviate his lack of understanding? I grimaced at him. “How am I to get rid of you? I’d hoped you were just another bad dream.”
He tried his best to speak, but again produced nothing beyond hoarse croaking. As his attempts grew more desperate—and remained fruitless—his knuckles turned white and his face scarlet.
“Calm yourself. Like as not you’ve had a blow to the head and it’s unsettled you.” I tried to mime the words. Ineptly, as it appeared. He waved a hand as if to clear the air of my foolishness, while kicking savagely at a chair that toppled onto my woodbox, scattering twigs and limbs all over the floor and leaving my lone glass lamp in danger of tumbling off a shelf.
“Get out of here!” I said, pointing at the door. “Go and introduce yourself to Darzid.”
He didn’t go, of course, but I swore I would not attempt to communicate again. I ignored him and went about my morning’s work, stepping over his long legs when I needed to, controlling the temptation to drop an iron kettle on his head.
When I peeled my flat round of bread from the iron plate in the hearth, I expected him to pounce on it. But he remained seated on the floor, his back against my bed. He dug the heel of his hand into his temple, squeezing his eyes shut as if the bright sunlight that streamed through the door pained them.
“Are you ill?” Dismayed at the thought, I broke my vow of silence. “Curse you forever if you’ve brought fever here.”
Whether or not he understood my clownish gestures, he shook his head as if to clear it, got to his feet, and stumbled out the door into the sunny morning. Before I could even wish him good riddance, he crumpled to the dirt. I hurried to his side, experiencing a perfectly idiotic wave of guilt, as if by wishing him away so fervently, I was somehow responsible for his collapse. Moments earlier, I had been wishing him dead.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said, tapping his cheek when I could get no response. He still didn’t move. But when I shook his left shoulder, his eyes flew open, and he cried out with bloodless lips, almost rising up off the ground. “All right, all right. Let’s get you inside.”
Once I had dragged and wrestled him onto the bed, I pulled aside the makeshift tunic. The mark on his shoulder that I remembered as a mere scratch was now swollen purple, hot, hard, and seeping a foul-smelling black fluid. I’d never seen anything like it. Dredging up what I knew of such matters, I scalded my knife and lanced the wound, trying to get as much of the vile fluid out of it as I could. Aeren almost bit through his lip as I worked. “I’ve got to do this,” I said, grabbing a dry cloth to blot his brow. “You’ve gotten something nasty in it.”
As I applied a stone-root poultice to Aeren’s shoulder, he drifted off to sleep, leaving me awash in memory. How not? I even found myself whispering, J’den encour. The words meant heal swiftly in the language of the J’Ettanne. Unfortunately, the words had no efficacy coming from me.
Have you learned nothing, stupid woman? I threw down my towels and left the man to his fevered moaning, busying myself by splitting and stacking wood, filling the woodbox, hauling in extra water, pouring water on the garden, anything to stop thinking. Flour and water, salt and millet went into a bowl for more hearthbread. I threw the rabbit bones and two shriveled carrots in a pot of water on the hearth to make broth. Starving the bastard would not get him out of my bed. I needed him away from the valley. What if Darzid decided to make another sweep?
Aeren awoke near sunset, somewhat surprised to find himself in my bed and mostly undressed again. He watched silently as I made willowbark tea, mixing it with yarrow and a spoonful of wine to ease his pain and fever.
“Don’t get any ideas,” I said, deliberately and obviously holding the steaming cup above his bare torso and discreetly covered nether parts before putting it to his lips. He made no move to take the cup as he drank. “You’ve done yourself no service, running through the underbrush as you did.” Setting the cup aside, I changed the dressing on his shoulder. Not long after I finished, his fever shot skyward again, and he slipped back into restless sleep. I sat up with him most of that night, applying cold cloths to his face and body, dribbling willowbark tea down his throat, and cursing myself for a fool.
The next morning, when I woke from an uncomfortable few hours on the floor, Aeren was sitting up, his eyes fixed so intently on my face that I could almost feel their heat on my skin. Sitting on the side of the bed, I removed the bandages and was astonished to see the horrid wound well on its way to healing, only a bit red and slightly tender. Youth has distinct advantages when it comes to recuperation. “So, you’re better this morning,” I said. Fires of Annadis, why did he stare so?
Once I had renewed the dressing and tied up the bandage again, I busied myself about the cottage, trying to break the lock of his gaze while tidying up the remnants of my herbs and pots.
After a wobbly visit outdoors—I did not even consider following him out—he seated himself at the table. With one hand he gestured at his stomach and his mouth, while with the other he pointed accusingly at the idle pots beside the hearth. Though sorely tempted to grant such rudeness the empty reward it deserved, I threw onions, cheese, and my last five eggs into a skillet on the fire. He’d been none too well fed when I’d found him; after his fever, he must be weak as an infant, and I wanted him to put leagues between us today. “Sorry, I’m not adept at bludgeoning rabbits. You’ll have to do with what I’ve got.”
I was convinced of his recuperative powers when I saw what he ate that morning: an entire round of hearthbread and every bite of my eggs. No encouragement to moderation had any effect on him, and when he emptied his bowl, he banged it down on the table in front of me, pointing a reproachful finger at its desolation. When I refused to cook anything more, he ate all the wild plums from the basket on the table and used his spoon to break off great slabs of cheese. Before I could get it wrapped up and stowed back in the stone-lined hole in the bank behind the cottage, he had eaten a quarter of the pale yellow wheel that I had planned to last until autumn.
Astonishingly, Aeren was pacing the floor by midday, restless with inactivity, not fever. I shoved a pail into his hand. “Fetch some water and I’ll heat it, so you can wash before you go.” But either he didn’t understand my gestures or didn’t want to understand. He dropped the pail at my feet, retrieved the dwindling cheese yet again from my crude larder, and sprawled on the woven rug beside the hearth to eat more of it. Grinding my teeth, I fetched water from the stream for my own washing, seriously considering whether it was enough to drown the brute. When I returned to the house, he was rummaging through my things again, just as he had on the first day.
“Get out of there,” I said, slamming the lid of the clothes chest. Only quick reflexes saved his fingers from being crushed. “What are you looking for?”
With precise and insistent gestures, he demanded a sword.
When I made it clear I had nothing of the sort, he stomped away angrily and sat sulking by the pail of water,
dabbling his hand in it and watching the dirt swirl around his hand as he rubbed two dirty fingers together. “That’s mine,” I said, moving the pail away from him and setting another log on the fire. “I’m no serving maid or bath-girl. You’re quite well enough to take care of yourself, and you smell like a stable.” I held my nose to illustrate my point.
He looked me in the eye and kicked over the pail, spilling the water all over my floor.
“As you wish. I’ve no time for spoiled children.”
I began to sort the burdock, scabwort, sparrow-tongue, and bristling spur nettle that I would trade for eggs and butter in the village, purposely ignoring Aeren and the mess he had made; I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me clean it up. A childish response to match his childish behavior. But the hostility in his gaze told me that his anger was anything but childish. The swelling in my throat was only now subsiding, and the slightest touch reminded me of the bruises that remained. Whyever had I brought him here? Never again. Never.
When the plants were clean and bundled, I snatched up my sewing things and a shift that needed mending and moved out to the bench outside the door. The sun beat softly on my face, and the rasp of bees in the clover was the only disturbance on the hot, still morning. Aeren followed me out, slouching in the shadow of the doorway for a while. Then, abruptly, he strode to the center of the meadow and began to wave his hands about in jerking motions, like a scarecrow come to life. Soon he was whirling and thrusting, bending and kicking, rolling onto the ground, and then picking himself up again.
Dropping my work in my lap, I watched in fascination, certain he’d gone mad.
But gradually his movements lost their insistent frenzy and became more fluid, and I at last recognized their patterns: lunge, spin, slash, parry… Swordplay: graceful, powerful, masterful. Whoever was chasing him had better make sure the man never got his hands on a sword. I glanced uneasily about the boundaries of the meadow. Who was he? Why was Darzid after him?